


and though I can't recall your face (I still got love for you)

by jessequicksters



Category: DC Extended Universe, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, M/M, Recovered Memories, Soulmates, it's a magical planetary alignment baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:48:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25846882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessequicksters/pseuds/jessequicksters
Summary: Something’s not right in the universe. It’s the seventh of July and the stars look like they’re slightly out of position for where they need to be at this time of the year.Someone has changed the timeline. Seven years later, Clark finally remembers the man who saved the world, who loved him like the sun, and who, eventually, comes back to him.
Relationships: Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 11
Kudos: 109





	and though I can't recall your face (I still got love for you)

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in a world where Clark is maybe Superman, but also maybe not in the same way we know it. Identities are more hush-hush and there's no Justice League - so these superheroes are a lot more isolated in their own cities/worlds.

It’s exactly seven past seven when Ma serves up dinner on the table. Barbecued meat from the grill. Mashed potatoes with extra butter. Corn on the cob, also with extra butter and a sprinkling of paprika.

Clark looks at her, and then back at his plate, steaming with goodness and warmth and it smells like home, except—

It isn’t enough.

“Are we expecting someone tonight?” he asks, as she pours sweet tea from the jug into his glass. He watches as the ice falls and clatters onto each other, immediately melting away with each passing second. She gives it a good stir with a spoon and there it goes again, the rapid melting of something that used to be whole.

It feels like memory, somehow, something he can’t quite place.

“I don’t think so, sweetie,” she smiles as she takes a seat next to him. “Why?”

Clark sees flashes then, of someone else at the table.

_Strong hands, clasped over his. A jaw that could cut like a knife. Clark feels his fingers trailing over it as he laughs—steady and with a heart that he keeps guarded, close to his chest._

_He remembers the drum of his heartbeat. Always irregular, like he was running from something, or maybe towards something._

_“This life—you have a life here. A good one. I’m not—I look around and I feel like I shouldn’t be here, but I want to be. You have stories in you, Clark. Stories that are like gospel to people. To me. You’re so good, so full of light. The world can’t lose you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”_

Clark snaps out of it, midway through shoving a spoonful of hot mashed potatoes in his mouth. He asks Ma if anyone’s been here recently.

“No one you knew, sweetheart,” she replies, brows twisting together as she looked at him with concern. “Is everything okay, Clark?”

He smiles, not wanting to waste this last dinner with her. “Of course. I’ve just realized—I was thinking about a story at work. My mistake, Ma.”

He cuts through the steak and accidentally cracks the plate.

-

Something’s not right in the universe. It’s the seventh of July and the stars look like they’re slightly out of position for where they need to be at this time of the year.

Has someone messed with time? He tries to recall the previous week. Nothing special. Just another week at The Daily Plant, chasing stories for Perry and working with Lois overtime in their cubicles. Not enough sleep.

He parks the tractor back in the garage before leaving in the morning. He makes sure that everything was where it was meant to be for Ma. The flashes come back, then, as he looks at the moon again.

_“I love you to the moon and to Saturn,” the man tells him, holding his face in his hands._

_“Saturn, huh? Can I ask why?”_

_“Yeah. Had a bit of a fascination when I was a kid. My parents had a telescope in our observatory. Don’t laugh. It’s the type of thing I grew up with. Of course,_ you _could just fly there if you wanted to, but to me, it was this elusive, special thing.”_

_“You’re a funny man, Bruce Wayne.”_

_“Most people don’t think so.”_

_“Most people don’t fly to the moon. Or Saturn.”_

Clark imagines himself saying the name on his tongue, then tries it himself:

“Bruce Wayne.”

Saying his name feels like a fight he’s trying to win; like pulling teeth out of his own mouth, soft and open for the man he’s trying to remember. There’s something strained about the way the vowels fall out, like they’re wrong—

—perhaps, another name filled its place once, and the _him_ in his memories had only recently started using it, too.

He’s certain they’re memories now. He’s faced supernatural, reality-bending entities before. He’s fallen to Starro before, where his dreams became a punishing prison of bliss and falsehoods.

Clark wonders what the truth about himself is, then.

If not for this picturesque, quiet life—what kind of a life did he live with Bruce Wayne?

-

_There are weeds in his dreamscapes. Tall ones. They strangle him like poison ivy, and he feels himself sinking into this ashy green sea of death. The sun eclipses red. He loses his strength all at once._

_He sees a man flying towards the sun in a black jet—like the Oneiroi, Roman black-winged daimons that personified dreams._

_He screams with the anguish of a million stars dying all at once._

_“This was never your fault, Clark. It’s mine. It’s you, knowing me—choosing me. It’s putting all of us at risk. I won’t let you make that choice.”_

_Nodding nights don’t come easy for superheroes. Sleepless men don’t get to choose what they’re sleepless over._

_“For me, it’s you. It’s the thought of losing you, Bruce. I’ll fix it before the sun turns red tomorrow. Before you'll even open your eyes in the morning. Anything you want—dream it, and I’ll make it happen.”_

_Bruce lies to him, then, even though Clark doesn’t realize it at the time. He dreams, with difficulty, for a world where they both make it out alive._

_But dreams don’t fix a world catching fire, and neither does love._

-

Mortals aren’t made to sculpt reality. As inhuman as Clark may be, he’s still mortal, which means he’ll never fully understand why things are the way they are, why there’s a crack in his chest where love once bloomed like flowers in underground caves.

He won’t remember the way Bruce Wayne outsmarted destiny itself. As the world caught fire, Bruce unraveled the flames, thread by fine thread—not in one great explosion, but in an undoing of reality and time.

It would’ve been impossible for almost anyone else to manage it—to trim the hems of destiny so carefully, so methodically that the world was kept intact.

A sacrifice had to be made—their memories, which would only come back to them at the parallel strike of seven, seven years after the event, under the alignment of seven particular planets in the sky.

_Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn._

He won’t remember why Saturn is the seventh planet in the universe instead of the sixth. He won’t remember the addition of Ceres to the solar system, during this version of the timeline, tilting the map of the galaxy to a slight angle.

Little does Clark know that the rush of memories will end as soon as the planets move out of alignment tomorrow morning, at the arrival of the big rising sun.

He then hears a knock at the door and jumps out of bed to answer it.

It’s him.

Dressed in black, with eyes that mark a lifetime of lost memories. Clark recognizes him, but also doesn't at the same time. His hair is slightly more peppered than they were in his dreams; there are newer, finer lines on his face, and more broken bones than he had had before.

“You found me,” Clark says, in a tone that takes Bruce by surprise.

“I—I’ve been meaning to reach out. But I found your address and I thought it was easier to just drive out here. You know, see for myself,” Bruce says it like the conclusion to a hypothesis, a scientific theory that had to be proven.

Clark sees the black Lamborghini parked outside of his house and marks the origin of the license plate.

“You drove all the way here from Gotham?”

Bruce nods, a little wary still. “Night owl, of sorts.”

Clark isn’t sure how to proceed. He catches the sound of Ma’s feet meeting the creaky floorboards upstairs and panics, “Where are my manners, would you like some sweet tea, or—”

“Clark? Who’s out there?” Ma asks in a sleepy voice.

He rushes to get the tea out of the fridge and set the coasters down on the table, closing the door behind Bruce and offering to take his coat. Bruce stops, then. Clark hopes he isn’t shell-shocked.

He’s usually subtler about these things.

Bruce’s darkling blue eyes are cynical but curious. He takes a step closer towards Clark, meeting his eyes as Clark finds himself enchanted by those magnificent, heavy, dark brows. 

“Can you really fly to Saturn?” Bruce asks. Clark still isn’t sure if this is a test.

Bruce moves closer to whisper in his ear, “I promise I won’t tell.” Clark feels his lips quirk into a smile as they brush against his neck, rushing with warm, pulsing blood.

He feels his voice shake, utterly embarrassingly, as he takes a breath and replies, “Yes— _yes, I can_.”

**Author's Note:**

> this is absolutely based on the taylor swift song, seven (and the rest of folklore too)


End file.
